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Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
- BookPage 7y agovice article on same thing submitted 2 days ago and discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22413526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22413526 Edit: And apparently discussed even more 2 weeks prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22301091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22301091
- dr_dshiv 7y agoAnd discussed in 1692, by Bernoulli, Mersenne and Kircher http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1979HisSc..17..258K/0000258.000.html http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1979HisSc..17..258K...
- jay_kyburz 7y agoI should do this for words.
- yummybear 7y agoA aardvark awkardly advances A aardvark awkardly announces A aardvark awkardly apprehends ...
- primrose 7y agoAn* aardvark
- gattilorenz 7y agoThat comes much later.
- admiral33 7y ago2035 everybody must speak in grammatically incorrect sentences to avoid being sued by the algorithm.
- teekert 7y agoHaha, nice line of thought. Almost, just almost (and scary because of it) imaginable as a real future.
- wnkrshm 7y agoThat is why I hope that experiments such as the one that the artists in the article do aren't successful and their copyright does not hold up in court. If it did, an actor with more resources could feasibly blanket own any cultural good of value and automatically, quantifiably argue how close any arbitrary third party creation is to their copyrighted material.
- lsiebert 7y agoYou really got to do it for letters, as you can't know what new words might develop.
- shiado 7y agoIf you create a program which provably generates all of the members of a specified set, do you own the copyright to a member of this set regardless of the runtime of your program?
- jmkd 7y agoI've often thought how strikingly easy it seems to be to produce sentences that have probably never been written before. For example: I am typing these words on a mobile phone whilst sat on a train to an airport, wearing a green jacket, brown shoes and a maroon hat with a black bag containing gifts for my children. That seems a fairly prosaic sentence at first glance but I doubt has been written before.
- rzzzt 7y agoTry searching for it in the Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/ (edit: ninja'd)
- jmkd 7y agoFantastic project, thanks!
- samplatt 7y agoThere's a subreddit for that: https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/
- iainmerrick 7y agoI’m sure I’ve read (in the context of Google searches) that it’s very easy to write a sentence that’s never been written. Most sentences on HN are probably completely unique.
- saalaa 7y agoOf course, it's already been done: https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/
- jrockway 7y ago"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."
- drno123 7y agoNow is the time to train convolutional NN to find "catchy" melodies, and then unleash it over this dataset, and become famous songwriter.
- throwqwerty 7y agoYou wouldn't use a CNN for this because there's no spatial correlation to take advantage of. Maybe an RNN somehow but the basic problem is scoring (ie how melodic a song is) not classification so honestly I don't know you'd do this using neural networks.
- nicklo 7y agoOn the contrary, with a more generous reading of the previous comment, it holds some merit. 1. CNN's are used fairly commonly for sequence tasks nowadays. Convolutions can be 1D after all. 2. It's also possible the previous comment was referring to using 2D convolutions on the spectrogram of the audio, which is a common approach. 3. Neural networks are capable of more than classification. Scoring is a regression task which is common application of neural networks.
- throwqwerty 7y agoa 1D CNN is an extremely simple RNN... do people really run 2d convolutions on spectrograms? that seems rather backwards to me - why convolve in frequency space when you can just multiply in the time domain. re regression tasks: sure I guess that's just an embedding basically right?
- drno123 7y agoYes, I meant to run 2D CNN over generated spectrograms. We do something similar to classify some specific emissions in RF with good success. As for scoring/classification, you can start by having an output of CNN say whether the song is catchy or not.
- 7y ago
- classified 7y agoCopyright law that make something like this necessary is not justice but perversion of justice.
- theGreatgame 7y agoI’m just gonna jump in and say how cool this is. I get that it’s not perfect but it’s sort of a middle finger to “the man”.
- patio11 7y agoBut this will of course not work, because enumerating the bitspace does not produce bits of the right colour: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- Double_a_92 7y agoA tl;dr would be nice it you post such a long article that doesn't directly seem to have anything to do with the current topic.
- Leszek 7y agoIt's actually very relevant, the TL;DR (from memory) is that lawyers (and judges) aren't programmers, and the source of data (referred to as the "colour of the bits") is as important as the actual bits of the data. Thus "I have this bit pattern as part of a bit enumeration" is different, to the legal system, than "I have this bit pattern because I specifically created it".
- pishpash 7y agoWhat's the legal principle that distinguishes methods of generation? Even if enumeration is definitely on one side, there is an infinite gradation from there to human generation.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe principle is: what actually happened. "Enumerated" is a different colour than "composed by human".
- im3w1l 7y agoThe line between enumeration and a very prolific artist is blurry. What if someone instead of just enumerating them created actual songs featuring them as themata? And what if those songs were tool-assisted? But still catchy? I see it as likely that someone will eventually try it not just as a legal strategy but because of a genuine curiosity in music and AI. According to wikipedia > There is a long tradition in classical music of writing music in sets of pieces that cover all the major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. These sets typically consist of 24 pieces, one for each of the major and minor keys (sets that comprise all the enharmonic variants include 30 pieces). I don't think anyone would say there is any ill intent even though it is based on an enumeration.
- shoo 7y agoIt's interesting to think about this from a more general perspective: what if we're not limited to midi, and we're talking about a more general kind of _design_ problem, where the design problem is to select a good solution to a problem within some (large) but finite and theoretically enumerable search space. We can think of selecting a good melody to fit into a song as one example of a design problem -- searching through some finite enumerable space of melodies and selecting a melody that's a good fit. A lot of the effort in this process is testing and evaluating the melody to see if it is any good to listen to / any good in context. This effort hasn't been done if you simply brute force enumerate and list the search space without testing anything. There are many kinds of design problems where the effort of checking if a proposed solution is any good vastly outweighs the effort of suggesting a solution. We could do the same thing for other kinds of design problems. In principle, what if we enumerate some (vast) finite space of digital circuits -- if we put a few limits on the amount of stuff we can put into a single circuit, and discretise any continuous parameters to produce a finite space. Does that mean we can copyright all these possible circuits, even if we put no effort into seeing if any of them are fit for any purpose? Can we enumerate some large finite space of possible arrangements of atoms into molecules and then copyright them all, without putting any effort into analysis or experimental testing to see if any of the proposed molecules are fit for any purpose? Snisarenko made a similar criticism when this was posted 15 days ago: > As other commenters have pointed out, this is gimmicky, shallow and clickbaity. All that they did was count from 1 to 68 billion. Any piece of digital data can be converted to a number, and if we apply their argument then you can be "creative" by just counting numbers. But we all know that's not true. Once the search space becomes that big, you can't actually "enjoy" any of these melodies. Because you can't listen to all of them in your lifetime, the ones that you WILL hear are going to be awful 99.999 percent of the time. Hence, the "creative" process is navigating this search space, and figuring out which melodies are catchy. Better yet, trying to figure out how or why our brain decides to like or not like a melody. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306857 From my perspective of framing this situation: this is dumb, as no design of any melodies has been performed. The design is the uniform prior distribution over some space of all possible melodies, most of which will be uninteresting / not fit for any particular purpose, which is a pretty uninspiring notion of design.
- 7y ago
- lillesvin 7y agoAdam Neely (professional musician and YouTuber mostly about music theory) did a video about this with the guys behind it: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw
- Lewton 7y agoThis really needs to be at the top, as it answers a lot of the criticisms found here on HN
- ehnto 7y agoIt also makes it clear they realise the limitations of the exercise (it isn't nearly all possible melodies), and it shows their motives a bit better too (helping protect against corporate music copyright trolls).
- onion2k 7y agoThe idea might be to prevent lawsuits, but presumably the authors have opened themselves up to being sued by anyone who already owns a melody. If melody owners can't sue the authors then their work can't protect anyone either.
- DiabloD3 7y agoThe artist suing, however, would have to worry about legitimizing this work. If the artist suing were to win, it would be setting precedent that everything else is the archive is also copyrightable, including all the melodies that are novel.
- A_No_Name_Mouse 7y agoWouldn't they get into legal issues as they are colliding with every song already in existence?
- bonestamp2 7y agoSince they're not trying to profit from them, they'd probably just get cease and desist letters and take the offending ones down. Since one of the founders is a lawyer, it's probably feasible to handle most minor conflicts that come up while still protecting the vast major of the melodies.
- IvyMike 7y agoOverhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
- nullc 7y agohttps://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar/page/n15/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar/page/n15/...
- albertzeyer 7y agoThe code is written in Rust. The core algorithm can be found here: https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli/blob/master/src/utils.rs https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli/blob/master/src/ut... (Specifically the function gen_sequences. It basically uses multi_cartesian_product to iterate over all permutations.) Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org (https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets)? I mean, as we see, it's trivial to create them. The code above is kind of a self-extracting archive, so it's just the same thing but in compressed form. And I guess it should not matter (legally) whether you store it compressed or uncompressed (or less compressed).
- nck4222 7y agoBy that logic, the library of Babel owns the copyright on every piece of literature that could be written, which would be a terrible idea. https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/
- virgilp 7y agoThey don't pre-generate all the "books", right? So they can't claim the copyright (it's not "affixed to a physical medium")
- danbruc 7y agoSo what is the difference between a program that views some text by reading it from a huge file and a program that views the same text by generating it on the fly? Especially if the file is generated by the very same process that happens on the fly in the second case? Why would you even have to actually build one of the two programs, enumerating all possible character sequences of some given length is a somewhat obvious idea and actually implementing that idea, especially if the text is only generated on the fly, does not bring the text into existence substantially more than just pondering the idea. I guess for matters of copyright you have to produce a specific artifact, just blindly enumerating all possible artifacts is not good enough. Which would also mean that the existence of all those MIDI files will not make a difference.
- grizzles 7y agoI hope someone Copyrights all possible Java method signatures for the Oracle v Google case. You could write a "compression/decompression" tool in the website's javascript for people to check if you own the Copyright or not. There would be many pages of data so you might want to make it work offline with a Service Worker. To prove you are on the up and up.
- Robin_Message 7y agoI am not a lawyer, but as I understand copyright law there seem to be to be two problems with this: - a copyrightable work must include some human creativity. It seems to me that an enumeration of possibilities might be creative, but there is no way an individual element of that enumeration can be considered creative. - Copyright depends on copying. If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song, then you infringed its copyright, regardless of if there is an licensable version of that melody that you could have copied. What matters is which one you copied, not the existence of alternate copies.
- tzmudzin 7y ago> What matters is which one you copied, not the existence of alternate copies. Not a lawyer either, but "I came up with this myself" is the standard defense of the artists, with mixed success.
- Iv 7y agoTo be fair, this program is a stupid response to a stupid problem. Even if that muddied the waters for a year or two, that would just be a patch, not a fix. The fix is political. Call for copyright reforms.
- Lewton 7y ago> Copyright depends on copying Copyright claims have been won by arguing the song was so widely available that it’s unreasonable to assume the defendant did not have access to it, which is why they’re trying to spread access to this as far as possible
- dredmorbius 7y agoThose are precisely the objections I'd raised with the Damien Rhiel (submitted via email, no response). Additionally there's the problem of releasing the works to the public domain. As discussed a couple of weeks ago when the 2016 billion-dollar infringement lawsuit against Getty Images was attempted ... and thrown out of court ... the act of putting works in the public domain also extinguishes, in the court's eyes, the rights of the author to sue for any claims including moral claims of authorship. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22340325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22340325 So: clever stunt, but legally impotent, both by law and the self-neutering actions of the actors here. Adam Neely's video (interviewing Rhiel and collaborator Noah Rubin) covers many points of copyright, though not the originality, authorship, or PD angles. (Posted elsewhere in thread, echoing here.) https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw
- tunesmith 7y agoIt's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc. Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.
- Intermernet 7y agoIt's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars, then this is a completely valid argument against such a weak argument. The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years. The current state of music copyright law is an absolute joke, and deserves to be "disrupted" (destroyed).
- goto11 7y agoSo I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws? You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.
- Lewton 7y ago“You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.” Yes that’s actually the entire point of this A lot of commenters seem to be missing the fact that this is a response to ridiculous arguments being used in winning court cases
- fphhotchips 7y agoYes, of course it means that. I might randomly generate data to test with. Doesn't mean it's private and needs to be treated as such if I accidentally and unknowingly stumble across real info.
- amelius 7y agoIsn't any substantial block of random bits already covering this?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tomlong 7y agoI know it's many orders of magnitude more difficult.. but if I got a printer to print out one of every possible art and published it, CC licensed it, etc wouldn't that have the same legal status as these melodies... probably none? I showed this article to a musicologist (in the UK) and he said: > I assume that somehow lawyers can refer to a precedent of "this is too ridiculous to be taken seriously"
- tomlong 7y agoJust to quickly add, I think the project is cool, it provokes interesting discussion and it doesn't need to be legally watertight or achieve what they say they set out to, to be worthwhile.
- cyphar 7y agoThe other thing is that machine-generated works almost by definition do not reach the "creative" aspect of the "original and creative" requirement for copyright to apply.
- bdowling 7y agoExactly. Their work is not protectable under copyright because it is not a work of authorship, but an exhaustive list of all possible melodies.
- nullc 7y agoGonna leave this here: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- codingmess 7y agoIsn't everything already published in the digits of Pi?
- Techies4Trump 7y agoI hereby copyright every combination of ones and zeros of length one to infinity, now you cannot sue me .
- nmeofthestate 7y agoDefinitely the most extremely programmer thing I've seen this week.
- makach 7y agoSo...they have remade all songs made as well? I predict lawsuits coming...!
- golemotron 7y agoIt's time to repost _What Colour are your Bits_. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- emilfihlman 7y agoCopyright law is a joke and this is the perfect way to demonstrate that.
- ailideex 7y agoAnd yet this will prevent exactly 0 lawsuits.
- dusted 7y agoI think it's an interesting idea, however, wouldn't this also risk generating already-copyrighted melodies? Putting archive.org at risk of getting massively sued ?
- anonsivalley652 7y agoThis reads like an Onion article. I heard about this on Lawful Masses with Leonard French, a copyright attorney who pwned Prenda Law. Also, the number of potential melodies, considering the degrees of freedom involved, is on the order of the number of games of chess. IANAL but this doesn't seem more than a stunt to call attention to the legal climate.
- stiangrindvoll 7y agoSo we could create a directory in IPFS with all melodies possible? :)
- 725686 7y agoThis reminds me a lot a short story "The Library of Babel" by argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges in which he conceives "a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel *Edit: book -> short story
- mustacheemperor 7y agoThere is at least one website that hosts a "real" library of babel (generatively). https://libraryofbabel.info https://libraryofbabel.info
- varelaz 7y agoI hope that will not hurt them. Imagine that in copyright lawsuite I refered to their midi archive as a source and since that they become in charge for copyright infringement.
- nephrite 7y agoIt can be argued that since the melodies were generated by an algorithm, they are not a product of creative process and therefore not subject to copyright.
- KMnO4 7y agoNow all we need is some “head cheese” [0] to generate the same thing using human neurons [0]: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=687 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=687
- ShadowErin 7y agothis is kinda getting out of hand
- andrewclunn 7y agoSo when will they generate all possible opening lines to stories (by which I mean 12 words or less of course, with no proper nouns) and copyright them?
- filoeleven 7y agoReminds me of an aside in Accelerando: > His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream – coincidentally uncompressing it – and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo – but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too ... https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
- ngneer 7y agoThis was on HN several days ago, is it a double post?
- KIFulgore 7y agoBobby Prince certainly wouldn't get away with the original DooM soundtrack today.
- shadowgovt 7y agoAssuming we accept their premise: how does this prevent lawsuits? Wouldn't the melody-set they've created be subject to a copyright infringement claim from every melody produced before their experiment that is still under copyright?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- db48x 7y agoThe method of generation prevents that. They didn't listen to song A and write down the melodies from it, then listen to song B and write down those melodies. They generated them all in order using a computer program. Presumably it prevents lawsuits because I can write a song starting with a melody from this archive knowing that it's in the public domain. (Or because it makes obvious the absurdity of having a copyright on a 12-note melody in the first place.)
- cormacrelf 7y agoIt doesn’t prevent lawsuits, or do anything at all. Other comments here are close; this material is not an original work, so copyright does not subsist in it. No copyright, no ability to place in public domain or issue licenses at all. This is the equivalent of pouring a glass of water in the ocean and then declaring you own all international waters.
- db48x 7y agoIt certainly contains many melodies which are not original. But what about the rest? It either contains some melodies which are original or it contains no original melodies. In the former case then they can be copyrighted, and in the later case they cannot (well, that hinges on access rather than mere equality, but I'll ignore that). However, in the latter case nobody else can get copyright on any new melodies either.
- cormacrelf 7y ago
- parasense 7y agoI'm sure this has already been remarked upon in comments, but.... Not every possible melody! A significant portion of melodies likely to be generated by people, or put another way these are the more trivial melodies. The range of complexity is vast, so just like cracking passwords might use a dictionary attack, or use English alphabet, or similar limited scopes, so it goes here.....
- kabdib 7y agoBack in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a reputation as one of the more helpful geeks. One fine day a marketing guy knocked on my door and asked: "What would it take to print out every possible eight-by-eight bitmap? We want to copyright them so our competition can't use them." Seriously. So I told him the story about the king who wanted to reward the inventor of chess, and upon being asked what he wanted the inventor said "one grain of wheat for the first square, two for the second, four for the third..." I thought a bit, and added "I think that printout would outweigh the planet." He went away. I was not a helpful geek that day. Later I realized that I had only considered black-and-white bitmaps, and that preempting copyright on color bitmaps would have meant a lot more planets. There's got to be a Douglas Adams style tie-in here somewhere involving aliens with planet-chewer-uppers invading and taking Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and then us for some cockamamie copyright scheme in another galaxy . . .
- syntheticnature 7y agoOnce, a guy at a bar told me he wanted to do a similar thing: displaying a 100x100 image that changed once a second to run through all possible bitmaps. He didn't believe me when I told him that doing so would exceed the the lifespan of the planet (to say nothing of what state the universe would be in).
- tripzilch 7y agoWhat I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :) [0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.
- olooney 7y agoBeholding the Big Bang, 2009, by Arthur Ganson A series of 12 pairs of reduction gears, each at a 50:1 ratio. On the left, a motor spins at a high rpm; on the right, the drive shaft is embedded into a concrete block. It will be 13.7 billion years before the final gear completes a single rotation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno
- kyancey 7y agoSpoiler alert: This will not prevent lawsuits.
- scotty79 7y agoIt wouldn't work in my country. Thing has to have individual creative quality to be copyrighted. Autogenerated stuff doesn't get copyright unless a human chose one of the autogenerated things for some particular creative reason. Then this thing gets copyright.
- braindongle 7y agoLove the spirit of this work, but nobody is an authority on what a melody is. How many different tuning systems were used? Why 8 notes? Why not 0..n notes? [0] Is a given melody, realized at 10ms per beat a melody? How about a 17-month pause before the first note? [1] Absurd? Sure. But who decides where the boundaries are? Lest one think that there is only an appeal to extremes here, check out Polansky's beautiful Lonesome Road, and put boundaries around melodies [2]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Larry-Polansky-Worlds-Longest-Melody/dp/B003P5AJIU https://www.amazon.com/Larry-Polansky-Worlds-Longest-Melody/... [1] https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-ha... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIifUv1Tmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIifUv1Tmk
- eweise 7y ago8 notes is what popular music is based on. I don't see why it matter what the tempo is. Pretty sure no one would be in danger of copyright infringement of a 17 month pause.
- braindongle 7y ago> 8 notes is what popular music is based on. OK, forget everything I said but the 8 notes thing. Just, no. "Yesterday"? Great melody. whistle just the first eight notes. "Yesterday, love was such an eas". Hmm. Wonder if there are more examples.
- db48x 7y ago99% of all music is pop music, and the tuning system for all pop music is 12-tone equal temperament. Would a jury even be able to tell the difference between 12TET and just intonation?
- DannyB2 7y agoNot to cause a combinatorial explosion, but... next they need to generate every possible chord progression underneath that melody.
- JackFr 7y agoWon't they have inadvertently copyrighted tunes already under copyright? That is to say for anything written before this stunt, they've given away rights they don't own.
- MoroCode 7y agoWhat an awesome effort. However, frivolous suits will still remain especially in places where the burden of proof rests on the defendant. A lot of these suits are filled knowing that they can't win but use the machinery to drain the defendant's resources until they are forced to submit because they have no means to fight it.
- justaguyhere 7y agoI wonder if someone has done this for other things like say, generating all possible combinations for 9*9 Sudoku etc
- yepguy 7y agoThis is something else. What will happen to the origins of sound after all the sounds have sounded?
- awwaiid 7y agoNot the greatest recording, but fantastic lightning talk kinda along the same lines but for code, "Mark Dominus - Debugging the De Bruijn Sequence (YAPC::Asia 2007)" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QhtuG4htrb0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QhtuG4htrb0
- fargle 7y agoAll very interesting discussions. Some have broached on it, but let's be clear: mechanically generated sequences are not copyrightable. The program that generates them is, of course. It doesn't matter if there isn't enough space to enumerate them all. It doesn't matter if most of them sound like crap. It doesn't matter if some match a pre-existing song. It doesn't matter if you do or do not highlight "interesting" songs. The very fact that they are machine generated eliminates the element of creativity that is a central requirement to copyright. Copyright law may be stupid, but it isn't this stupid. An even more stupid argument that isn't even valid doesn't really help. > 503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author. > In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable.
- christiangenco 7y agoHere's a quick app I made to page through and play each of the melodies in the All the Music catalog: https://gen.co/allthemusic/?notes=53325332 https://gen.co/allthemusic/?notes=53325332